In his first novel, the poet Ben Lerner describes afternoons spent in the park in Madrid. On some days the balance of chemicals in his body - the mixture of sleep, weed, caffiene and “pills” are just right and on these occasions he is able to write. The writing state is illusive and unstable and doesn’t come easy. On the whole everything is bad and writing is impossible. The comercialised and miliatarized language he lives in feels foreign, useless and futureless and he feels like an anachronism in front of it.

He casts himself as the hash smoking paranoiac who hears what they say as though through someone elses ears. Stoned, on the roof of his apartment, he sees himself from a plane “me looking down at myself looking up” Only with this distance can he procede or navigate the inertia that haunts him.

*The Meat Eater in the title of this exhibition is the id if the protagonist is the Vegetarian. Vegetarianism for him is a mild form of ascetism, importantly though, although it is a practice of abstention, it is a postitive decision in terms of his life as a whole. It marks a time in his life he sees as the present.

“That’s when I started doing this.”

Gabriel Stones graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2014, previously studying at Liverpool John Moores University. He was a Co-director of The Royal Standard, Liverpool from 2008-2009. Selected exhibitions and residencies include: 21st Century Graduate Screening, Chisenhale London (2014), Echo: The Poetics of Translation - Tropical Lab 7, Lasalle, Singapore (2013), Premiums, Royal Academy Of Arts (2013), Everything and More, OSR Projects Summerset (2012), All Change, Rogue, Manchester (2009), Gostopgo, Residency, Redruth, Cornwall (2007).